Skin_In_The_Game - [email protected]  ## Metadata - Author: **[email protected]** - Full Title: Skin_In_The_Game - Category: #books ## Highlights - How is it that we have more slaves today than we did during Roman times? (Location 336) - the best pieces of advice I have ever received was the recommendation by a very successful (and happy) older entrepreneur, Yossi Vardi, to have no assistant. (Location 870) - Tags: #rationality - If you do not undertake a risk of real harm, reparable or even potentially irreparable, from an adventure, it is not an adventure. (Location 2236) - Tags: #risk #favorite - The reason a dream is not reality is that when you suddenly wake up from falling from a Chinese skyscraper, life continues, and there is no absorbing barrier, the mathematical name for that irreversible state that we will discuss at length in Chapter 19, along with ergodicity, the most powerful concept I know. (Location 2242) - Before we end, take some Fat Tony wisdom: always do more than you talk. And precede talk with action. For it will always remain that action without talk supersedes talk without action. (Location 2258) - Tags: #wisdom #rationality - Lindy is a deli in New York, now a tourist trap, that proudly claims to be famous for its cheesecake, but in fact has been known for fifty or so years by physicists and mathematicians thanks to the heuristic that developed there. Actors who hung out there gossiping about other actors discovered that Broadway shows that lasted for, say, one hundred days, had a future life expectancy of a hundred more. For those that lasted two hundred days, two hundred more. The heuristic became known as the Lindy effect. (Location 2571) - Tags: #rationality #favorite - The idea of the Lindy effect is itself Lindy-proof. The pre-Socratic thinker Periander of Corinth wrote, more than twenty-five hundred years ago: Use laws that are old but food that is fresh. Likewise, Alfonso X of Spain, nicknamed El Sabio, “the wise,” had as a maxim: Burn old logs. Drink old wine. Read old books. Keep old friends. (Location 2617) - Tags: #philosophy #favorite - To put it another way: if wealth is giving you fewer options instead of more (and more varied) options, you’re doing it wrong. (Location 3050) - Tags: #wealth #money - The best enemy is the one you own by putting skin in his game and letting him know the exact rules that come with it. You keep him alive, with the knowledge that he owes his life to your benevolence. The notion that an enemy you own is better than a dead one was perfected by the order of the Assassins, so we will do some digging into the work of that secret society. (Location 3080) - Journalism isn’t Lindy compatible. Information transmits organically by word of mouth, which circulates in a two-way manner. (Location 3215) - Tags: #information #favorite #lindy - If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life. (Location 3314) - Tags: #rationality - If your private actions do not generalize, then you cannot have general ideas. (Location 3317) - Tags: #rationality - Finally, when young people who “want to help mankind” come to me asking, “What should I do? I want to reduce poverty, save the world,” and similar noble aspirations at the macro-level, my suggestion is: 1) Never engage in virtue signaling; 2) Never engage in rent-seeking; 3) You must start a business. Put yourself on the line, start a business. Yes, take risk, and if you get rich (which is optional), spend your money generously on others. (Location 3379) - This chapter will ease us to the next section: a) rationality resides in what you do, not in what you think or in what you “believe” (skin in the game), and b) rationality is about survival. (Location 3703) - When you consider beliefs in evolutionary terms, do not look at how they compete with each other, but consider the survival of the populations that have them. (Location 3840) - Tags: #rationality - Rationality is risk management, period. (Location 3857) - Consider a more extreme example than the casino experiment. Assume a collection of people play Russian roulette a single time for a million dollars—this is the central story in Fooled by Randomness. About five out of six will make money. If someone used a standard cost-benefit analysis, he would have claimed that one has an 83.33 percent chance of gains, for an “expected” average return per shot of $833,333. But if you keep playing Russian roulette, you will end up in the cemetery. Your expected return is … not computable. (Location 3921) - “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything (Location 4015) - Tags: #rationality #favorite - We close this chapter with a few summarizing lines. One may be risk loving yet completely averse to ruin. The central asymmetry of life is: In a strategy that entails ruin, benefits never offset risks of ruin. Further: Ruin and other changes in condition are different animals. Every single risk you take adds up to reduce your life expectancy. Finally: Rationality is avoidance of systemic ruin. (Location 4059) - Tags: #favorite #philosophy - When the beard (or hair) is black, heed the reasoning, but ignore the conclusion. When the beard is gray, consider both reasoning and conclusion. When the beard is white, skip the reasoning, but mind the conclusion. (Location 4075) - Tags: #philosophy #favorite - skin in the game falls at the convergence point of three main ethical systems: Kantian imperatives, consequentialism, and classical virtue. (Location 4105) - Rent Seeking: trying to use protective regulations or “rights” to derive income without adding anything to economic activity, without increasing the wealth of others. As Fat Tony would define it, it is like being forced to pay protection money to the Mafia without getting the economic benefits of protection. (Location 4301)